Promoting the procurement of highly nutritious food to make children healthier
The United Nations World Food Programme has announced a $ 10.7 million grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to help vulnerable children get better access to nutritious food through school feeding programmes in Benin, Ghana, Honduras, and India. The two-and-a-half-year initiative focuses on including fortified foods in school meals as well as advocating for more nutritious food throughout the programmes.
In Benin, Ghana and Honduras, the project is expected to directly impact the lives of more than one million school children. The project will also promote local food production, benefiting smallholder farmers and provide school cooks with information on optimal nutrition for children.
In India, the project will support the technical assistance provided by WFP to the government’s school feeding programme, directly benefitting 325,000 children, and seeks to reach more than 110 million school children through food fortification and communication campaigns that encourage healthier eating.
The newly announced project builds on a previous grant to WFP from The Rockefeller Foundation to address malnutrition among children in Burundi, Kenya and Rwanda by bringing fortified beans and fortified wholegrain maize meal into school meals. To support this transition in those countries, WFP is working with value chain actors and medium-scale millers in their shift to wholegrains, which contain five times more nutrients than refined grains.
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